Sunday, 21 August 2016

Conversion by Katherine Howe

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane comes a chilling mystery—Prep meets The Crucible.

It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and school is a pressure
cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering
boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected
to keep it together. Until they can’t.

First it’s the
school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into
uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly
spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and
symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s
buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.

Soon
the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to
find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the
girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for
extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once
Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly
bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .

Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times
bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful
novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really
happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?

“How on earth could they think feeding a urine cake to a dog would be a solution?”

This was a YA mystery story, about a group of girls at a private school who fall ill with a mystery illness.Colleen was an okay character, and I appreciated how hard she worked to be valedictorian, and how much effort she put into her school work, even if it meant she was a little slow on the uptake when it came to her friends.The storyline in this was about a group of girls at Colleen’s private school, who all fell ill with strange symptoms, and nobody could work out why. We also got some chapters which were set during the Salem witch trials, and had Colleen trying to puzzle out the connection between what happened then and what was happening at her school currently. These Salem chapters were a bit weird though, and it took a long time for the correlation between the past and present really came to light.The ending to this was okay, but there was still a bit of a question over exactly what had happened.6 out of 10